Meaningspecifically

Meaningspecifically is a term used in linguistics and information science to denote the explicit specification of the intended sense of a word or phrase in a given context. The concept helps address ambiguity that arises from polysemy or contextual vagueness by attaching a precise meaning to a token for interpretation, processing, or retrieval.

The term is a neologism formed by combining meaning and specifically. In practice, it refers to the practice of selecting, labeling, or encoding a single sense from a word's lexical entry and treating that sense as the one that should guide downstream tasks.

Applications include lexicography, where meaningspecifying annotations aid dictionary users; natural language processing and artificial intelligence, where sense-specific representations improve disambiguation, retrieval, and generation; and corpus linguistics, where annotated segments enable targeted analyses of sense usage.

Example: In the sentence "I deposited money at the bank," a meaningspecifically tagged interpretation would mark the intended sense as "financial institution," rather than "land beside a river," based on context or explicit user specification.

Origin and usage: The term appears in contemporary discussions of semantic annotation and word sense disambiguation as part of methods to make meaning explicit in data and models.

See also: sense disambiguation, lexical semantics, semantic annotation, word sense.